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Wednesday, 7 November 2012

1995: Only Mediocre Writers Are Translated

José
Saramago begins 1995 with political meditations on super-powers:

As to the North-American dominion, I think it’s
an invincible fatality: we know the causes, we don’t ignore the intentions, and
neither has been enough to know how to resist the methodical processes of
compression and cultural lamination of which we’re being victims, with our
historical cultures rapidly losing cohesion and vital density. In a Europe
incapable of questioning itself, the most common posture today is one of
resignation that has hit rock bottom. Pointless to say that no other state of
spirit could so better suit a German imperial project which has stopped
bothering to disguise itself: the game had barely started and we had already lost
it…

With the
loss of sovereignty in Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy, and soon Spain and
France, due to the European economic crisis, and the imposition of draconian
austerity measures, these words now seem prescient. I wish he were alive today
to know what he’d write about these events. The European Union winning the
Nobel Peace Prize wouldn’t have passed him by without an ironic newspaper
article. About his scepticism he says, “I’m a sceptical European who learned
everything about scepticism with a teacher called Europe.” He constantly
expresses his belief that the ‘European construction’ will only destroy local
cultures and tradition in the name of a super-bland culture and identity. He
predicts that the European citizens will fight this destruction of the
collective memory of national peoples and that this is what will doom the EU.

Although
Saramago is obsessed with Germany, in his mind the source of many modern evils,
he doesn’t shy away from blaming other countries for their responsibilities.
“The problem, today, is that no one who is small and poor wants to accept the
evidence of their smallness and poverty. So the backward countries of the South
won’t come together nor find each other, each one living in the dream that one
day they will be admitted into the house of the richer ones, even if just to
open the door to the guests, whom it envies, and to serve the cognac, which
then will try to drink in secret.” This perfectly describes the current
situation of Southern Europe, with each country pretending he’s in a better
situation than his neighbour, all denying the evidence of their impending collapse,
pretending they’re fine, blaming the others. Saramago would surely have found
this lack of solidarity hilarious. It’s also doubtful he even believes this
solidarity is possible at all. “Man, in spite of a lot of AIDS and a lot of
cancer, in spite of a lot of earthquakes and droughts, has no other enemy but
man.”

Of the war
in the Balkans he just writes, “November 22. Peace in Bosnia. Peace in Bosnia?”

Regarding
what many consider his obsession with Christianity, Saramago explains that he
only writes about religion because, in spite of being an atheist, he lives in a
world shaped by religion; since it’s an exclusively human phenomenon, as he puts
it, he sees it as his duty as a writer and citizen to address religion.

On the
literary front, Miguel Torga passes away. Torga was one of the greatest
Portuguese writers of the 20th century, poet, novelist, short-story
teller, playwright, and diarist (sixteen volumes comprising the years between
1941 and 1994, admittedly far more than Saramago’s measly five volumes).
“Miguel Torga died too soon. I now understand I would have liked to know him.
Too late.” He meets Susan Sontag, whose novel The Volcano Lover, he presents in Spain. Saramago expresses his
happiness about Jorge Amado having received the Camões Prize in the previous
year. Then in November he’s informed he’s the recipient of the 1995 Camões
Prize.

Saramago
writes of himself as a writer: “I only write about what I didn’t know before I
wrote it. That must be why my books don’t repeat themselves. I repeat myself in
them, because, even so, of what little I continue to know, what I know best is
this person I am.”

Regarding
his Voyage to Portugal, he claims he
wrote it like the travel books in Europe from the 17th and 18th
century, when “Europe started travelling inside Europe.” I had never noticed
that, but then I haven’t read travel books of that time, save for William
Beckford’s curious trip to Portugal.

He comments
a curious passage from one of Vergílio Ferreira’s diaries: “The most translated
authors are normally the minor authors, meaning the ones who speak to the
mediocrity of the general humanity.” Saramago, who is the most translated
Portuguese writer in history, simply asks: “If Vergílio Ferreira had as many
translations as Dostoevsky, would he have written what he wrote?” He could more
easily have asked, “Who is Vergílio Ferreira outside Portugal?” But that would
have been mean. Ferreira, whose books I occasionally like, is, truth be said,
no one save in Portugal, which makes a pastime of believing it harbours great
but unfairly unknown novelists. Like Saramago once said, it’s not that Portugal
lacks great writers, it’s just that the government, the embassies, the
publishers and the media do little to nothing to promote them outside the
narrow confines of our “patch of earth edged by the sea,” to quote Torga’s
lovely description of Portugal. Saramago, it should be noted, is considered great
not because the Portuguese media say so – it in fact resisted his consecration
as a great writer, envious of anyone who achieves success without their help –
but because the world says so, much to the chagrin of our “great” writers who
of greatness only have the evidence from their national literary circles, but
beyond our borders no one has ever heard about them. Saramago, who had already
broken of one the great taboos of Portuguese society – being a communist,
atheist writer with an active public voice - will never be forgiven for also being the most popular Portuguese
writer of all times.

Letters
continue to arrive from abroad. From Italy a theatre producer wants to turn his
books of newspaper articles, A Bagagem do
Viajante and Deste Mundo e do Outro, into
a musical play about memory and childhood, for young audiences. This person is
one Francesco Di Maggio. After Azio Corghi turned two of his books into operas,
another Italian is interested in adapting his work to music. What is this
obsession the Italians have for Saramago? The hate mail is also decreasing.

Other
events he mentions: the plight of Turkish writer Yashar Kemal, sued by his own
country for allegedly advocating separatism in favour
of the Kurds, to which he belongs. He travels to Manchester University to receive an honoris causa, thus becoming the first Portuguese writer to achieve
such an honour. “Even though vanity is the sin that will lead me to hell, as
some press theologians never tire of telling me, I was satisfied.” During a
lunch with Juan Goytisolo, the Spanish writer tells him that a Portuguese poet,
after Goytisolo told him he had liked The
Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, complained: “How is it possible that you
like that book when Saramago made Ricardo Reis a heterosexual?” Although
Saramago asks, Goytisolo diplomatically refuses to reveal the identity of the
poet. I keep thinking informal conversations between writers must be the
strangest, funniest conversations imaginable.

He
continues to work on Blindness: “This
time, the type of pessimism of a writer from Portugal will not manifest itself
in the usual venues of a melancholy lyricism that characterises us. It will be
cruel, raw, nor will style be there to smoothen the corners. In Blindness we won’t cry the intimate
pains of the invented characters, what we will be shouting there is this absurd
and interminable pain of the world.” Melancholy lyricism, now that’s an
accurate description of 90% of our literature. If he had added “mind-numbingly
humourless” (Eça de Queiroz excepted), it would be complete and perfect.
Amazing how a writer who wrote so unlike Portuguese writers understood it so
well, from the inside out. He finishes Blindness
on August 8 and reveals that he’d got the idea on November 6, 1991, when he was
having a meal alone in a restaurant. August 18 he sends the finished book to
his editor, Zeferino Coelho. He claims the despair and scepticism in the novel
is different from his previous ones because it’s aimed at the whole world,
without the historical or topical background to dilute its intensity.

In
Lanzarote things are calm. He has already adopted three dogs: Pepe is joined by Greta and Camões. His
daughter, Violante, and his grandchildren visit him in Lanzarote during
Christmas. “It was a good year,” Saramago writes at the end of the diary.